Flight Of The Bumble Bee

Posted on Tue Aug 15th, 2023 @ 3:35pm by Captain Benjamin Ingram Dr & Lieutenant Commander Mara Ricci & Lieutenant Commander Jillian Toomey & Lieutenant Commander Meilin Jiang

Mission: S3:1: Castaways
Location: 187 AU's from Carpathia
Timeline: One month from yesterday

Far beyond the heliopause of the Carpathia sun, lay the realm of rouge planets and lonely primordial rocks. These lonely travellers of the void did not glitter with distant starlight but instead sulked in shadows, destined to wander for aeons until the very winds of the cosmos eroded them to dust. So when the only sizable rock in a volume of space no larger than the island of Australia was rudely accelerated to .5c of light speed, it came as something of a shock.

Dust and gravel were similarly displaced, as a sheering wave of gravitons ploughed through local space making a vacuum momentarily more pure than ever before. It was into this perfect empty canvas, that the first of the ships arrived. Nimble scouts, followed by slower cruisers and ships of the line, the largest of these a catamaran hulled vessel proudly holding the name of a battle won in the name of freedom for all. Each vessel arrived in a staggered formation, keeping clear lanes of fire amongst themselves.

All of these vessels were then dwarfed by what followed. Whereas the fleet of vessels had arrived with ordered precision, their engines carving through warping space with a dancer's finesse, this vessel literally fell out of warp. It did so with an ever so gentle tumble along its long axis like a ball throw tends to curve. Wide with a domed cap at its fore, tapering to a narrowed spindle to its rear, the four nacelle pylons that sprouted organically from its machined frame began to wane in their bright colouration.

Canopus's first and only test flight was, at best, described as 'Meh'.

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+++Station Operatiosn Deck+++

"Four hundred thousand kilometres from the aim point," Benjamin Ingram said as he studied the main holographic display. A simplified map of Messier 4 hung in the air, littered with the names of visited stars, and the catalogue numbers assigned by both Starfleet Stellar Cartography and the Carcosian Navy's own map wrights. He turned an eye to the four-person Science team who had been responsible for calculating the course for the largest starship ever constructed by Starfleet.

"Adequate," he said with a curt nod. This was as close as a fatherly hug that the taciturn Station COmmander would ever come to. He then turned to regard the rest of the assembled crew, from the holographic avatar of Mara in the Engineering Module in the tail to the corporeal figures actually in Ops.

"Reports people. We just moved an orbital space station massing millions of tons of dry weight 1% of the distance from Sol to Alpha Centauri. What Starfleet Corp of Engineers do in four years, we just did in 5 minutes-"

Five minutes of rattle hull panels, as conflicting and alien-designed structural integrity fields waged a war of attrition against the fact that space stations are not superluminal by design.

"-we will have leaky hull plates, we will have lost power somewhere. Operations I want a report on how the Station is holding up: have we pancaked any decks and did we leave anyone behind? Engineering, status on the main reactor and our trio of purloined warp cores: are we at risk of becoming a star for a brief moment in time?" Ingram said, looking to Toomey and then to Mara's avatar, before moving on. "Science, I want to know if we're all soaked in everyone's cosmic radiation to make us all get cancer four times over. Are we moments away from colliding with a rogue planet. And finally," Ingram said, reaching down to press a button on his console."Major Braddock launch the air wing. Until we know if we're flight worthy assume we're not and have just become a target."

“Would I let anything go supernova?” asked Mara with a smirk. “Wait. Don’t answer that. Preliminary reports show everything a bit overworked but within normal parameters. I’ll know more in about two minutes.”

"Overworked by a five-minute test flight at Warp 1, so if I do the math right..." Ingram paused mid-stride for a moment, before continuing his walk around the command deck. "One hundred and twenty-five years, of which a third of that will be spent on these micro jumps whilst the other two-thirds will be us hanging in space repairing and growing older. I want a list of improvements we can add to get us to at least Warp 5 for a protracted period of time."

“I said a bit,” repeated Mara. “Meaning a little more than I’d like for a five-minute test flight. They weren’t made to move anything as big as this. We modified them based on math and guesswork. But now we have some data and can tweak them further. I’m confident we can meet expectations.”

JT looked shaken, but not stirred. Or perhaps her insides were stirred and her outsides were shaken. She was surprised they didn't die and her bullshit idea had sort of worked. She cleared her throat.

"We need to use Portia to mine every available out here. We need to reinforce points at." She read off a series of critical junctures around the new ship-station hybrid. "We also need to work on integrating the nanites into the hull to regenerate as much damage as they can with the raw materials, or take as much damage as they can themselves before Canopus starts taking damage."

"Radiation levels are within safety parameters," Meilin reported, "but neutrino concentrations are off the charts. If we don't dissipate them, we could potentially leave a trail leading right to us."

Ingram made a gesture to the holo display, and a wireframe model of the station appeared in the air. Large domed upper docking levels, the skirted Hab module, the lower engineering levels, and the four nacelles sprouting from those same lower levels.

"We can't move the Station quickly enough to go hunting for resources. I suggest we liaise with the Rish and Mining Guild representatives to work up a resource extraction plan, use their skills to best effect. Major Braddock you'll need to arrange a guard force for this phase of operations," Ingram commented. "As for our glowing tail of luminal particles, Commander Jiang I assume you have some thoughts on how to be rid of them?"

Meilin looked clearly troubled despite her best attempts to hide it. Her long history with Ingram from even before Canopus Station dictated what he was apt to do with the information she gave him. Weaponize it.

"My concern is that any attempts to artificially dissipate concentrations of this magnitude at any rate that would hide our presence would face adverse effects such as a graviton ellipse or a massive forced neutrino inversion, the primary principle in historical Romulan weapons of mass destruction." Knowing that Ingram might not take the warning as a sane person would, she added, "If we have to choose between initiating a mass detonation or a catastrophic subspace anomaly, and leaving a breadcrumb trail, I don't know if the trail is the worst option. If I have more time..."

"Time is something we have until we have none of it," Ingram mused. "Graviton ellipses are chaotic in their nature, wandering to and fro from points in three-dimensional space through subspace. Could we instead push it into a lower band of subspace, perhaps use the Phase Space Transceiver to bury it in Phase Space?"

Meilin shook her head. "Only temporarily. Graviton ellipses are spatial anomalies of an electromagnetic nature. They are drawn to EM fields such as emitted by celestial bodies and starships quite literally like magnets. If we inadvertently create such an anomaly and bury it in Phase Space, there is no telling where the anomaly would emerge back into standard space or what may come with it. All we would know is that it must emerge at some point and at some time." Taking a centering breath, she added, "While that may seem more expedient for us personally at the moment than setting off a cosmic flare gun like a forced neutrino inversion, it would not be without potentially catastrophic repercussions. Perhaps..." She bobbed her head in thought in uncharacteristic uncertainty as she fished for last-ditch alternatives. "... perhaps if we cannot avoid neutrino disturbances, then we settle for a lesser disturbance and hope for the best. Utilizing coordinated graviton pulses from multiple tractor beams, we could push our neutrino trail off the mark enough to confound any pursuers." Suppressing the surge of hope and the desperation it would bring, Meilin kept her voice cool and even. "Not enough to scatter the concentrations if we wanted to avoid catalyzing either aforementioned hazard, but I recommend it as safer than an attempt to dissipate or doing nothing."

"A good point well made," Benjamin said. He made another gesture to the holo display, and the diagram of Canopus Station shrank away, vanishing to a single point before being joined by a great collection of stars forming a rough-hewn sphere of stars. A single blue star appeared on the outside edge. "And given our location, such an outburst could be directed out of Messier 4 and away from the prying eyes of the oncoming Concordance invasion force. Make it happen, Commander."

Hoping that Ingram had only miscalculated and not ordered her to do something dangerous, Meilin said, "Sir, the strength of the gravitonic push from the coordinated tractor beams would be insufficient to push the neutrino concentrations out of Messier 4. The pulse levels required to do so could set off either of the crises we wish to avoid. At best, we could throw any potential pursuer off our trail by several marks which could be enough to elude them entirely."

“We could modify the main deflector array to collect the neutrinos,” Mara suggested. “It wouldn’t catch all of them, but it would eliminate enough to hide the trail. And then we find a safe place to release them.”

"I strongly advise against that," Meilin said. "Collecting any already elevated concentration into any sort of containment field would raise the probability of a forced neutrino inversion into a virtual certainty."

“I’m confident I can stabilize the containment matrix,” added Mara. “Wait- where exactly are they manifesting? Is it all around the station or to one side or the other? Bow or stern? Port, starboard?”

"The highest concentrations are of course around the warp engines," Meilin stated. "But that doesn't help us much since we are surrounded by them. If you're wrong, Mara, you will blow us all to oblivion and perhaps create a chain reaction that endangers the entire sector."

“In that case, it might be trickier, but we could use the deflector to scatter them,” Mara said thoughtfully. “Send them off in every direction. Again, it wouldn’t catch all of them, but it would create enough rabbit trails that nobody could know which direction we went. Unless they spent years following all the trails, that is.”

"Ship deflectors may do the trick, but they would need to be overclocked because they are designed to repel collisions whereas tractor beams use forced gravity to physically relocate mass," Meilin said, wishing her friend would not be so cavalier with everyone's lives in her advice to a vainglorious captain. "It would be advised to use a more powerful instrument gently than to supercharge a weaker instrument... for reasons I've repeatedly explained."

“True, but the deflectors are much bigger,” countered Mara. “Maybe we could figure out a way to make them work in tandem. Use the deflectors to scatter the tractor beam.” Her nose wrinkled as she puzzled over that. “That might be even more dangerous, come to think of it.”

Meilin closed her eyes and let out the breath she had been holding. "Agreed." Looking to Ingram, she asked, "What are your orders?"

"We're close enough to Carpathia that any signal that we're here will not give away our intended destination. And I agree, releasing a graviton ellipse into the local stellar neighbourhood would be a poor showing on our part. Use the tractor beams from the Task Force and the station auxiliary craft to scrub us clean Commander Jiang. Mara, I want your engineering teams to work on increasing power flow to the warp coils.

He eyed Mara dn Meilin, and then turned to Toomey.

"I seem to recall you feeding replicator feedstock to a portion of Portia before our jump. Would it be possible to take a metal-rich asteroid from the local area and do the same by pressing it against the hull? Might tempt Portia into spreading further," Ingram opined.

"Yes, Sir," JT responded after listening to the others for a few minutes. "In fact, that is exactly what I had suggested a few minutes ago."

Ingram thought for a moment, frowning as he realised that he had indeed just regurgitated the very notion once offered mere moments before. Whilst another might find personal fault with this, and offer an apology, Ingram was not so inclined. He gave a slight shrug and moved on.

“More comprehensive reports are coming in,” added Mara. “It looks like in the time we’ve been talking, everything has returned to normal. Dilithium reaction chamber, intermix chamber, isolinear coils- everything. I’ll have a full report to you in an hour including how we can counteract the effects in further tests.”

"I will take that report," Ingram said with a nod. "As with all other things, we're on a timetable. The Concordance are on their way, and we're on a starship with the motive power of a row boat. Let us move with alacrity and solve our myriad problems before more show up to compound the issue. Mara, work with Meilin and begin the neutrino bleed. Toomey, do your thing. Major Braddock can provide overwatch during resource allocation and the layering process. On that note Major, I want our fighter also out patrolling for any incoming warp signatures that might suggest a Concordance task force or vanguard."